The role of food standards in international trade: evidence from Brazilian beef exports to the EU market

The study reviews the literature on global chain governance and food standards to allow for an assessment of Brazilian beef exports to the European Union. The empirical approach employed is based on company case studies. The results suggest that the Brazilian beef chain has little choice but to adapt to market changes as standards evolve. Costs of compliance for meeting international food standards reduce Brazil's comparative advantage. At the same time, changes in the nature of demand have created the need for a more integrated supply chain in order to enhance confidence in Brazil's beef production and processing abroad.

Technology sourcing, knowledge management and governance in international inter-organizational innovation networks

This conceptual paper aims to improve our understanding of how internationalised firms use outsourcing and offshoring strategies to manage knowledge and information through the life-cycle of integrated product-service solutions. More precisely, we identify the appropriate theoretical framework for this analysis and investigate through in-depth case studies how UK engineering firms organise, coordinate, and incentivise work that is executed in globally distributed teams. Our research focuses on their UK and India offices to study the organisation and governance of distributed teams. The research has several theoretical dimensions - organization; geography; time and knowledge - that it addresses as boundary challenges.

Back from beyond bid-ask spread: estimating liquidity in international markets

Research on the topic of liquidity has greatly benefited from the improved availability of data. Researchers have addressed questions regarding the factors that influence bid-ask spreads and the relationship between spreads and risk, return and liquidity. Intra-day data have been used to measure the effective spread and researchers have been able to refine the concepts of liquidity to include the price impact of transactions on a trade-by-trade analysis. The growth in the creation of tax-transparent securities has greatly enhanced the visibility of securitized real estate, and has naturally led to the question of whether the increased visibility of real estate has caused market liquidity to change. Although the growth in the public market for securitized real estate has occurred in international markets, it has not been accompanied by universal publication of transaction data. Therefore this paper develops an aggregate daily data-based test for liquidity and applies the test to US data in order to check for consistency with the results of prior intra-day analysis. If the two approaches produce similar results, we can apply the same technique to markets in which less detailed data are available and offer conclusions on the liquidity of a wider set of markets.